New Orleans Haunted History French Quarter Tour

is this anybody's first time here show me hands how are you loving it don't care what's the matter Georgia tell Jim I'm not saying they're not haunted we got a beat we're older with 300 years old this year that was everybody had some good food since they've been here yeah have y'all had some good drinks I see some up you've got some going on we can do it in the street you know sometimes the horse you never know for sure but anyway tonight we are going to have a history and ghost walk at the lower French Quarter you're going to learn some of your art legends of more you're going to hear some of our ghost stories you are going to get a bit of history here can't help it and you're gonna get a little introduction into the history of Voodoo because y'all have initiated voodoo priestess as a tour guide tonight Oh bit of a history lesson here as I said we are 300 years old this year we were founded in 1718 by jean-baptiste she didn't willing to be in build of France now we are named Louisiana because Louis the 14th was the King of France at the time and so we are the land of Louis now the first neighborhood built in this was the entire city at the time was the French Quarter we had two major fires here we had one in 1788 that happened on Good Friday and it burned down 80% of the city we had eleven hundred and fifty-six 856 burp to the ground that night we then had another fire in 1794 that it had started only a block away from the first one broke down over 200 more buildings we hadn't even come close to finish rebuilding from that first fire most of our early French buildings were built out of Cypress which is our most common tree here but it's a very oily wood it does very well in floods it just does not do so well in fires so we rebuilt in the brick and the stucco that we are known for all the courtyards that's all Spanish today in the French Quarter we only have three original French buildings left we have more French buildings but there's only three originals and across the street from us here this green almight building that looks like it doesn't belong that is one of them oh wow and it's the only one that we have left it was a residence so that is what the French Quarter used to look like different a lot different that is a classic example of a raised French colonial hmm I must prefer our Spanish style honestly this is where they filmed the bathing scene in the movie 12 years of slave and it's also where they filmed the coffin scene an interview with a vampire that's a good ol for me now they did something really fun in that movie I'll tell you about this is some big golden world it's Laura for you there is the scene it's a funeral scene everybody is going a different direction we've got carriages and horses and it looks very chaotic they're all go to the same place they're all going to the cemetery this is the way we used to do funerals down here everybody went a different direction we did no processions and it was known as spirit confusion and it was done to confuse the evil spirits so they wouldn't follow you in the cemetery but if you just look up for a minute here you're gonna see spikes wrapped around these poles see them periodically throughout the zoo buildings my family so that daughter up to the galleries to get their Juliet well and just in case you think that looks a little too easy to get over we have other glue be traps woven into the iron oh wow so as you're walking around you see this like okay get the Julian Jackson this about to get another tire this building at one time [Music] boarding school for boys I'm tired we're about sadly everybody in this building was killed including the children it was very very tragic and very sad but I'm here to tell you right now oh boy I still live there for many years for many years yes it's gotten complaints about kids running up and down the hall away laughing and giggling and screaming making noises making mischief playing ball out in the courtyard I've had many friends stay here over the years I've had many people on my tours over the years they've all talked about the Laughing children in there for a lot of years this was an adults-only hotel so they bring their children staying there in addition to that it seems the boys have learned how to take over the remote control and they will turn that television set up are you in the room or not and scroll it through the channels so they find what they're looking for I've been told the Cartoon Network I honestly don't know if there's any truth to that they do like that [Laughter] my very favorite thing you all aren't going to remember this but a whole bunch of us here are going to what they had to get our film developed digital cameras we could not do it on our phones so people would come down on vacation and they would go home that goes if their film develop and pick up their photographs so they come down they go pick up their photographs they start sorting through they're reminiscing about their time in New Orleans and then they find pictures of themselves sleeping oh no taken from a ball folks this is really more of a photo opportunity for all of you very often paranormal activity will appear on camera but you can't see the naked eye really the reason for that more than anything else is our own brain filters that the cameras don't have now this is a place we've gotten a lot of interesting things on film and this is what we call a hot spot there's orbs in here frequently as well as ectoplasm for vapors but we have gotten apparitions apparitions are ghosts and they are a figure of a person the ghost that we see in here is a small child he's usually over here by the soda fountain towards the back we get a lot of orbs we get a lot of vapors that's more of a smoky substance where you could actually sometimes blow it up and see things in there and over here we've got some cool stuff out of this place what I'm going to do is move out of the way so you can all have a chance to try to capture the little ghost we don't know its name with it was a slave child so we call several shots of the same thing because sometimes you'll see if something appears in one and not another so I'm going to move out of the way it's a view and I'll try to capture Caspar and also don't discard anything for a couple of days you never know what you might discover so everybody okay I've got video y'all do pictures now our reflection in the glass will show up in the pictures anyway across the street from unclear is a very large gray mansion it's one of the largest mansions here in the French Quarter it's also considered to be the most haunted house in the city it is the little Laurie mansion yes indeed so for those of you American Horror Story folks that would be Kathy Bates okay this is a bit of a disturbing story but I'm going to tell you I will not be as disturbing as some people because it has been embellished so much over the years that it's just gotten out of hand and stuff that's being said about it just so I will start out by talking about Delphine McCarty and she was the lady of the manor Delphine was a very wealthy white French Creole woman her family had plantation all around the city and they left her a fortune she also was considered one of the great beauties in the area she had three husbands in her lifetime now her first two husbands died rather early in their marriages they also left her a tiny son making her one of the richest women in the United States her third husband dr. Leonard knew wait lolly there's some nice alliteration there was a physician from France and he came over here he was 20 years younger than she was and they had Lily indiscretions producing a child so then they got married and they built this house in 1831 and at the time it was the largest single family residence in all of New Orleans and actually it wasn't this house that house I will tell you about what happened to it but this is the right location now as the story goes it was the largest house in the city at that time people were clamoring to come see it Delphine was a very prominent socialite I'd love to show it off by having great and at gala parties standing at 11:40 realm of the beautiful brilliant and quite brutal Madame Delphine LaLaurie a rich talented and gracious hostess a leader in the town's social life what her admirers did not know about her was that this lovely creature tortured her slaves inhumanely at one time she was caught chasing a young girl with a young wit with a whip a bullwhip the young girl went all the way up to the roof and fell she dove out of fear into the courtyard full of stones and she died that actually happened that little girl is one of the ghost that haunts this place [Music] many years ago the family that stood here was a Spanish Paris this is Varick Street a block behind on Decatur Street is the old US Mint now the jazz museum the building that stood there originally was the French barracks Miss America and it was called fort st. Charles now earlier in the tour I talked about how the transition from Spanish rule did not go well the French and the Spanish didn't trust each other they didn't like each other the first governor that was sent down here by Spain was very ineffective and French pretty much ran him out so then they said gone a governor with Forks and he was nicknamed bloody O'Reilly I know O'Reilly and you a Spanish but it's true anyway he came down here marched over to port st. Charles assassinated 24 of their highest ranking and they made a prison in that building for the rest of the soldiers he would then periodically have them hang from the flagpole in front of their families and the community teach people a lesson they were not going to tolerate any kind of revolutionary behavior that Velux wanted to well as I said earlier the Spanish Attis for 40 years but when the French got us back again and even though it was for only 20 days they did not forget what happened at Fort st. Charles so the first thing they did was come down here march on in yeah there if all the Spanish officers take them out it to what it's now the parking lot and assassinated all of them in retaliation no see Spanish soldiers that sometimes cool area in the back there's been other ghost sightings here as well as several over every time they renovate a room upstairs they seem to wake somebody out which by the way it's not uncommon both could lie dormant but then all of a sudden [Music] listen so let me guess so about halfway through the tour you're going to stop here and really break it some air conditioning [Music] Jason down there at the far end of the bar you can get some refreshment we're sitting out here [Music] as beautiful pool it does like music nobody's in it every time I see water yeah it's dark out here so I brought you some trunks but we have a pool at our hotel and that is what a whole bunch hurting somebody [Music] happy hurricane happier agane [Music] alright here let me try that was that was actually a good luck [Music] okay yeah that's not that's better than yeah they are better than yep I don't I don't like hurricanes not that is good going back on the route this way talk a little bit about the history of Voodoo here in the city this is something that has come to us voodoo is a religion probably the most misunderstood misrepresentative religious in it came to us over 300 years ago from two places the slave trade in Africa and also we had 10,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution come over here during the Revolution France owned Haiti they owned us so that also added to our numbers of free people of color as well here in New Orleans we have a few different kinds of Voodoo we have Haitian voodoo we have African voodoo and we have what we call New Orleans and plantation booty boliviana meaning which is kind of a combination of the two of those and a whole data Catholicism throat into it Buddha when Catholicism is live side by side hand in hand and in spite of each other for over 300 years not going anywhere but there was a reason for some of that but I will give you just a brief synopsis I'm not going to get into this too deep because that's a whole different tour however Pluto is a monotheistic religion meaning we have one God one vast God so fast you cannot force on a fire the cornerstone of the religion is honoring your ancestors both your family ancestors as well as spirit ancestors that have been without a fight they're also elemental it's more of a nature-based path in Haitian voodoo we call those spirits Lavoie and African Buddha we call him arisha now here's how the catholicism got thrown into it there was a time here we're being a Catholic because we only recognize the religion that you were allowed to practice we are the most catholic city in the United States it was so strict on this that they would have a priest down at the docks and when the slave boats would come in the first thing that happened when they got taken off those boats I got christened Catholic hmm well how they made that work and still be able to practice their native religions once they would find a Catholic state that had similar qualities as their spirit Lavoie or a Risha and they would worship through that safe or hide behind it or a little bit about but it became so engraved that today probably 80% of Buddhist practitioners here and also amazing are Catholic as well Marie Laveau some of you have probably heard of her was a devout Catholic remaining about Catholic her entire life raise your children Catholic they were all baptized at st. Louis Cathedral across the street from us here this cool-looking yellow house that is known as the Beauregard Kai's house and it was one time the home of general PGT Beauregard a man who fired the first shot in the Civil War now he only lived there for about six months it was a boarding house and he lived there after the war he was also known as the great Creole but they say when he was there he suffered great depression and built over the number of lives that were lost in the various battles that he ended up and they say used to sit there and reenact it in his head and over and over again so much so that a lot of people believe he manifested those battles right into the living room because the number one haunting that goes on in here his battles in the living room he's sounds of cannon fire in the background and those two soldiers are sometimes seen running up and down the staircase wow this has gone on since he left now over the years the house started to fall into disrepair but in the 1950s it was purchased by author Frances Parkinson Kies and she restored the house to its initial grandeur however she was so disturbed by the hauntings going on in the living room that she refused to live in the main house so she just lived in the slave quarters in the back and she had lost her dog while she was here he died of old age so his ghost is sometimes seen on the porch and in the gardens so we've got no soldiers or cannons and battles oh my and the little dog too it's a Greek Revival it is right off the street from us is the provincial hotel now the provincial was at one time so these folks anyway during during the Civil War it was I said a Confederate Hospital now during the war we were one of the very first cities taken over by the Union Army the first thing that happened when they got into the South was they earned the city of Atlanta because that was the largest city in the Confederacy then they came down here capture the porch and that was pretty easily done because most of our guys were out fighting so they captured the park they stopped all shipments of food and supplies from coming into the south in an effort to a Daruma this also included medical supplies we got a bit of a problem we're at war we got in the hospital so we had to make do with what we had available to us but we had available to us for everything they used it to clean out wounds as an antiseptic and that really did help but then it was the closest thing to anesthesia that we had so if you were lucky mm-hmm you got a shot at whiskey and a leather strap to fight on if you were having an amputation and we did a lot of amputations back then because of the way the guns were designed and I'll by the way we did our amputations with a handsaw then we had to cauterize it and we did that with a hot cast-iron skillet we did addresses advantages of people had to give up their sheets their petticoats curtains whatever could be used for bandages in the case of a heavy bleeder say a gunshot wound what they would then do is to make cornmeal and wrap that in Muslim packet into the wound and then tourniquet it on now the cornmeal would expand the sieve absorb the blood and so it helped it help to control the bleeding a lot but it led to another big problem infection that too was the one I'm thinking about there was rats climb up and they'd stuck climbing up and they'd start chewing on the cornmeal Oh God so that somebody got the great idea to give these guys guns to shoot the rats where they were shooting their own feet off they were shooting each other not a good idea it didn't work out so well this was not a place anybody wanted to be however I will say eventually war's end life goes on we move forward now we have a lovely little Hotel in the French Quarter almost yes was the Spice Girls was when the Spice Girls came by nothing like this one okay that used to be ours anymore today they rent it out as the table that's how we repurpose down here at one point it was actually a bar called the morgue complete with a ghost in the bathroom and a coffin in the bar wild but this is actually where I talk about yellow fever whose yellow fever wiped up thousands of our people and it's a huge part of our history and we are a city that's right for it it's fun it's wet it's dirty and we should store our water and sister big old vessel that actually turned out to be a mosquito farm yeah and this of course is how the disease was spread now worst summer on record was the summer of 1853 we lost more than 10 percent of our population that summer alone the hospital was filled to capacity with the morgue was filled to capacity they had to start piling bodies up out in the streets in the summertime that smell yeah you got it and sadly this is how some people found their relatives the other problem is that we had such a huge epidemic that summer we did not have enough doctors or nurses to take care of some mistakes got made including people being pronounced dead when they actually weren't well you know expressly thing disease okay as they do better here but into our cemeteries I know some of you have well as as I most of you know on the cemetery as well if you want to go into the cemetery with me especially this time of year in the summer time you're gonna notice that it's about 10 to 20 degrees hotter but inside the cemetery than it is outside of the cemetery the reason for that for the most part we bury above-ground and family tombs and in wall vaults if it's over 300 degrees inside those tubes so well it's a very efficient use of land and I'll tell you why we don't involve the bodies before we put them in there we seal off the tomb and go back in after a year in a day and it's nothing but bone and ash basically what they are is natural crematoriums it was the Spanish style of burial and they were in control of the city when we built our first cemeteries up there not our very first cemeteries those were behind Jackson Square and on the river and on computer screen but because of yellow fever they built up a little ways out of town well after that awful summer people went back in and they made a very gruesome discovery in that cemetery scratch marks inside you got it they got cooked alive we did realize that was a problem yes it is so anyway we found a practice that they used to use over in England during the plague you've got when the minute where the body came into the morgue they got bells on their toes or on their hands so if the everyday consciousness it could be heard now you're gonna teach a trivia for the night this is where the phrase Saved by the Bell actually came from it was literally being Saved by the Bell they were dead ringers no I mean later on it became a boxing term and then of course we all know about screech but that's actually where it came from it was literal it was literal you were literally being saved by the dump also another phrase that came out of this which we use all the time is the graveyard shift somebody had worked on the graveyard overnight to listen for the bells you got it so that's how the overnight shift became known as the great Barry chest a lot of people that we have in here too but that's how it started so anyway you've got your little lesson and trivia tonight so this is this is the X morgue though that she's talking about okay so we just finished our haunted history tour I really enjoyed it Jason really enjoyed it the boys the boys enjoyed it yes okay thank you and they're just tired so we're walking back to the heavy tail now our map tell citizen 25-minute walk so everybody's really excited about that yeah we still got to burn off our dinner we were strolling on the haunted tour Don we're trucking it now there's a big difference in walking patterns oh he's sleeping on that hurricane this is very strong and if you drink it too fast you're gonna fall down and yes it is hot yes my face is beet red and that's humidity and it's okay how we're going to Jackson's far now there's a lot of Tours everywhere around the city we've heard we've seen so many tours there they're really cool they're cool I learned a lot today it's Jackson Square at night my little boys my big boy so good first day in New Orleans I don't think we've ever had a bad day in New Orleans we love it here oh yeah when the sun's down it's not so hard oh yeah you know I don't think we've ever been in Jackson Square at night very peaceful at night Gold golf anyone yeah yeah that's true the gates are closed we're home [Music] yay huh no we got to go by the front desk home yay look this hotels a lot bigger than you think see it's not just this building it's that too we're actually in that building yeah so this is a beautiful hotel [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: EECC Travels

Views: 298,974

Keywords: eecc, new orleans, french quarter, haunted tour, ghost tour, french quarter tour

Id: QUHKZT6UCmQ

Length: 34min 30sec (2070 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 30 2018